Mandy Nolan

Local low income residents in Byron Bay are the human koalas of our Shire. They too have lost much of their habitat. We need affordable housing now, not in three years, or five years, or ten. Now.

My shirt is not an invitation to rape me. My dress is not an invitation to follow me home. My strappy singlet is not the reason you lost your job. My body is not responsible for your behaviour.

What would you do if someone killed your children? A year ago, when the three children and niece of Leila and Danny Abdallah were struck and killed by a drunk driver while they were walking to get ice cream, I wondered how those parents made sense of that immediate loss.

The other day my friend told me she was watching a horse race and one of the horses was called ‘Zipitsweetie’. She was appalled. The name is supposed to be funny! A phrase usually used by a man telling a woman to shut up. To ‘zip it’, followed by the belittling term ‘sweetie’. That’s a statement of power and control used to silence women. Used to minimise us. It’s so normalised someone was comfortable about using it to name their racehorse.

Phil Manning picked up the guitar at 15. He’s been playing now for nearly 58 years. This year, Chain play the Byron Blues Festival.

Writer Laura Bloom has just released The Women and The Girls her latest novel with Allen & Unwin. Set in the inner west of Sydney in the mid ‘70s the book details the story of three women who have left their husbands, taken their children (mainly girls) and set up a share house.

It’s 6am, the sun is only just nudging its way through the clouds. I am up early to write my Soapbox. I was going to write on something else, but this morning when I woke and stumbled to my desk I saw my open diary: 22 January, Michael’s birthday. He would have been 61 today.

I love walking through cemeteries. I love to read the gravestones. They are like the first and last page of a novel whose contents I will never know. Here lies many from my community; they were born, lived, and then lost. They were loved. This evening I am walking with my 11-year-old daughter and my husband through Mullumbimby’s cemetery. It is a quiet and beautiful place. I feel the stories rumbling under our feet. I never understand why people see these places as creepy. They are places of reverence and remembering.

Forty years ago, musician Barry Ferrier rolled into Byron Bay. It was an idyllic place – with surfie bohemian types rubbing shoulders with the old school locals. Barry has been an integral part of a growing, thriving, and always-changing music and arts scene here. It all started when he teamed up with blues harp blower, and surfing legend, Rusty Miller. Barry spoke with The Echo about the early days, ahead of his nostalgic reappearance with Rusty, at the Rails, on Sunday.

When I first met Mullumbimby-based artist, Brendan Kelly, he was trying his hand at stand up. Energetic, larger than life, with astute colourful depictions...

Last week, in Byron, a house that doesn’t yet exist sold for $60 million. A beachfront holiday house. A tidy little weekender. The buyer bought a drawing of the house that is yet to materialise. It’s not even a home. It’s for holidays. A holiday from what? Makes me want to puke. We should all be appalled. This sort of wealth should not be celebrated. It’s destroying us.

COVID-19 has killed ‘just rocking up’. It was already on the endangered list, but now the spontaneity of rocking up may be dead forever.

There is something very nostalgic about backyard cricket. I remember Christmases where the garbage bins were pulled in for wickets and a few drunk mums and dads faced up to spin bowls from their eager kids.

I often go about my life and forget I am going to die. I forget about impermanence. I get caught up in the struggle of maintaining a mortgage, a career, a family. Stuff that feels permanent but of course isn’t.

Austentayshus is one of our fiercest satiricists. Speaking the unspeakable, the unflappable self-confessed provocateur is back for three shows in the New Year. 

This wasn’t the year any of us expected. It’s been full of disappointment, dashed expectations and uncertainty. To live in a time of global pandemic is history in the making.

As a feminist there are many times I have been called a manhater. It’s the go to put down to extinguish or disqualify legitimate rage.

Every week I sit exactly here and wonder what I am going to write. I don’t always know. It’s a constant mild anxiety where my brain filters through the trash to find a little treasure that hasn’t been touched.

It occurred to Nolan and Briggs that maybe the audiences that love their female take on life would love a man’s take on it too – but those men have to come from the same frame as the Women Like Us show. So, Men Like Us was born – a comedy show that features the comedic musings of the very Aussie Lindsay Webb, and UK comedian Dan Willis.

The face of the environmental movement is changing. For years those of us who stepped forward against big business or government were discredited by being called ‘hippies’ or ‘tree huggers’ or ‘professional protesters’.

Last week my column on old white men triggered a man who has been trolling me for the last few months to escalate his menace. He created a meme with a picture of me with ‘confirmed racist’ on my head, declaring The Echo is an anti-white newspaper and should be boycotted. BTW, white people don’t experience racism – we are the dominant culture.